Cretive Commons Monitor

I think if you are reading this blog, you must be familiar with Creative Commons (CC).  But have you ever wondered how widely spread this license actually is?  Well, there are people who are thinking about it and even started looking into the issue.  Giorgos Cheliotis is one of them.  He is currently a visiting scholar at Berkman and earlier this week he gave a talk about the CC Monitor project.

The project has been out there for three years, but the website is rather new and is still considered under development as the team is figuring out the best way to capture and analyze the use of CC licenses around the world.  They have built an online (wiki-based) platform/repository which presents the raw data and some visualizations for others to use and think about. This is what global distribution of CC licenses looks like.

There are overall estimated 170,268,161 CC licenses in the world, but the map refers to a subset of them.  It includes only the ported (i.e. jurisdiction specific) licenses – those that could be linked to a specific geographic location.  Apparently, there are about 50 countries in the world that have strong CC communities who worked on translating and adopting the general licenses to the local jurisdiction.

The darker areas of the map correspond to the higher number of CC licenses in the country.  Here is for example what Europe looks like once we zoom in:

If you go to the website, you can see the actual number once you hover over the map with your mouse.  The way they collect these data is through counting back-links (or in-links) to specific CC deed pages (like this one).  Of course it is not perfect, but it is more than what we had before and it is there for everyone to use.  The idea behind the site is to build a “live data wiki”, which brings its own challenges such as the data being updated constantly, but not the analysis and the explanations.

On the wiki you can find data about the individual countries and also what they call “freedom scores”.  These scores refers to the degree of openness of the licenses used in each place.  As you may know, there are different types of licenses one can give to his or her work.  This blog, for example, is licensed under by-nc-sa license, which would not score very high on the freedom scale (and I also need to fix things, so it would actually show here).  Overall, this is what the world looks like in terms of openness of the CC licenses:

As before, the darker areas represent higher scores.  You may want to take a look at this table comparing the scores of different countries side by side.

If you have the time, I suggest you watch the talk (I wish it was possible to embed videos from Berkman website :).  Giorgos goes further into a case study, asking whether people utilize the CC licenses and actually work with the open content.  I know that I learned a lot about CC that I did not know about before.

Tackling your creative minds

I really need to tackle your creative minds with a techy/geeky question.

Veronica received a basic Arduino kit for her birthday.  If you’ve never encountered it before, there are explanations in the link and here is also what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Arduino is a physical computing platform based on a simple I/O board and a development environment that uses the Wiring library to simplify writing C/C++ programs that run on the board. Arduino can be used to develop stand-alone interactive objects or can be connected to software running on a computer (e.g., Adobe Flash, Processing, Max/MSP, Pure Data, SuperCollider).

Here is another interesting discussion of Arduino.

Basically it allows you to add interactivity to objects by hard-wiring and programing the board and adding to various sensors.  We played with it a little bit and made various LEDs blinking in various fancy ways.  But now, we would like to find a more interesting, creative and maybe even (but really not necessarily) useful project.  This is where I need your help.

What would you do with Arduino?

To start the process, here are some interesting ideas we found on the internet:

• Taking pictures triggered by sound, movement, etc. – 1, 2 (super cool!).
• A couple of varieties of POV – 1 and 2.
• Twittering plants and fetuses.

And some claim that this can also be done using Arduino:

They even have a MySpace page, but this is slightly too much for us I think, at least at this point :)

So, what do you suggest we should build?

Messing around

As I wrote before, I am looking to redesign the site and I started playing with it a little bit.  So, if you are experiencing problems with the website, please pardon the inconvenience.

On the importance of being there

With all the beauty of the Internet and the fact that it helps us dealing with distance and phisical presence, there is something really valuable about “being there.”  The Berkman Center places tons of material online and theoretically, nothing stops me from spending hours on their website listening to the talks and reading the reports.  However, for me this rarely happens, unless I have a concrete task in hand and am looking for a specific piece of information.

Now, spending the summer at Berkman, makes me more conscious of the online materials the center is releasing.  For example, about a week ago Jonathan Zittrain (JZ) gave a really interesting talk about the history of the internet through the lens of domain name regulation.  Unfortunately, that one was not documented, but then, when I came across the video below, I did sit down to watch (most of) it.  I don’t think I would do it unless I had the opportunity to listen to JZ “live” just a couple of days before, but now I know that there is a good explanation of the basics of the Internet out there that I can use.

Same goes for other items, such as the luncheon talks.  For example, this week, Eszter Hargittai presented her new data about disparities in Internet-related skills among college students.  Although I am following Eszter’s blog and try to read what she publishes, I doubt I would have a chance to spare an hour watching her recorder talk.  Now, after actually being there, I would encourage you to watch both, her talk from this week and another one she gave about a year ago (below).

Of course I am not the first one to think about the importance of being there.  The idea has been around for a while, especially in the business world.  However, it is always fascinating to reach a similar conclusion based on your own observations.  It seems that the ability to attach a “face” to the content has an aura effect, beyond the immediate enhancement of communication between the people involved.  It shifts one’s attention towards other information produced in the same space, and most interestingly, it extends to the online environment.  I think that so far I was paying attention only to the reverse dynamics (when online communication enhances the following offline interaction).  It is interesting to now how it works in the opposite direction as well.  Being there focuses you on the materials produced by the people and institutions invovled, while probably taking away from your attention to informatin produced elswhere, even if that is a place where you have previously spent a lot of time at.  Some food for thought…

Speaking of CommFree

The idea of CommFree has recently come up in our weekly discussions with Berkterns.  By a nice coincidence, XKCD published the following comic, which I wanted to share:

Enjoy :)

So, what’s cooking?

I have been away from blogging for a while and kind of got “out of shape” (I even think my blog was removed from Technorati as inactive).  I was really busy working on my A-exam papers, but now, after over 120 pages of single-spaced text, I am getting back on track.  It is a particularly good timing as I am spending this summer in a place where blogging is actually considered work :)

So, what I’ve been up to?  Here is a short update.

I am spending this summer at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society working in the Internet and Democracy project.  Berkman is a really interesting place where seemingly unlimited (primarily intellectual) resources are combined with a really comfortable environment for people to let their inner geek/nerd out.  I am an “intern” and there are about 30 of us working all over the yellow house on Everette street (and thanks to Cathrine White, we now go by Berkterns – Berkman interns).  The summer is only at the beginning, but it looks promising.  So, if you are in the Boston area, please feel free to touch base.  I will be here until early August.

Please note that I’ve started reworking this site a little bit in terms of content, structure, and infrastructure (I really need to upgrade the platform).  I am using Wordpress and I am now also looking for a new theme.  The theme should be widget ready and also to have tabs.  If you have any ideas, please let me know.

As to actual cooking, please check out a new initiative Veronica and I have started.  It is called “Cooking Travels” and the basic idea is to explore various cultures through their food.  We are looking for people who would be interested to contribute to it on a casual basis.  So please let me know if you would like to take part.

In the next few days, I plan to release some of the post drafts that have been sitting there for a while.  Hope at least some of the are still relevant :)

Help me realize a dream!

For the first time in my life I am entering this kind of competition and I am really excited about it!

Microsoft and Lenovo have launched “Name Your Dream Assignment” competition.  They are going to give $50K to one of the top 20 photography projects that will win the popular vote on their website.

I just submitted mine and you can find it here (there is also a badge on the main page that is linked to my project).  Since there are space limitations for project descriptions, I also created a page here, on ThinkMacro, that has more details.  Please feel free to explore.

If you are reading this, I would really appreciate if you take a few minutes and vote for my project!

Please PIC IT!

Learning from students

One of the good things of being a teaching assistant (TA) is that I am getting exposed to a great variety of views and opinions of the students I am working with.  It is somewhat scary to think that many of these students are ten years younger than me, but it is often fascinating to learn how they are using MICT and what they are thinking about technology.

So I decided to share a couple of insights I have learned from (and about) my students.

Insight #1: Last semester I TAed for an intro communication class.  At some point (somewhere in late October) we were talking about the upcoming election and the use of MICT in election campaigns.  Specifically, the students were presented with a way of assessing political websites in terms of interactivity, hypertextuality, and social presence.  At the end of the class the 102 students were polled about what aspect of the website would be most important to them.  Thanks Laura and Sue, who agreed to actually count all the votes, I am able to share them with you:

• Interactivity – 35.3%
• Hypertextuality – 34.3%
• Social presence – 27.5%
• Combination of a number of aspects – 2.9%

If I recall the discussion in class correctly, this means that (1) the students appreciated an ability to “talk” to the candidates, express their opinions, and get involved in discussion, and (2) they appreciated an option to learn more and in depth about the subjects presented on campaign websites.  Needless to say that this is not by any means a rigorous or comprehensive study and we cannot really learn anything substantive from it, but nevertheless I think it is an interesting indicator.

Insight #2: The class I am TAing for this semester has a blog where the students have to post weekly assignments.  In the last assignment they had to observe their own usage of their mobile phones for a couple of days and then discuss issues that bothered them the most.  I have no numbers to provide this time, but here is what I learned from reading their reflections:

• They are connected! Not that this needed any proof from me reading the blog posts (PDF), but it is really amazing to read about the central role this device is playing in their social life.
• They are very responsive. One of the most common complains was about phone calls and text messages interrupting their studies, their sleep or their class sessions.  On the face of it, what can be easier than simply turning your phone off, but it turns out that missing phone calls or taking too long to response to text messages is not very socially acceptable.
• They want control.  As one of the common solutions, many students offered to have an equivalent of tagging so that they could catalog people in order prioritize phone calls and text messages as they arrive (note that this is different from assigning different ring tone to individual contacts).  Another popular feature they have advocated for was an ability to link their calendars to their mobile phones, so that the phones would ring, vibrate, or turn off according to their schedules.
• They don’t like uncertainty. Another commonly suggested feature was status notifications.  On the one hand, they want to let people know why they are not responsive or signal to people when it is appropriate to contact them.  On the other hand, they want to know why somebody is not answering their calls or text messages.
• Mobiles are social. Anther common complain was that the phone rings in inappropriate times (class, library, etc.).  It turns out that people really care about this and it is considered very embarrassing even to the digital natives.

Again, none of those observations is subject to any rigour, but I found reading these blog posts really interesting and insightful.  Hope you will find those interesting too and I wonder if any of the mobile industry players is actually working on developing some of the features the students have advocated for.

Promotion gone wrong?

Perhaps we got spoiled with Google showing ads relevant to our search, but it looks really weird when a search engine pushes irrelevant results as promoted websites.  Perhaps the degree of weirdness depends on the degree of irrelevance and I just encountered a really illuminating example.

Ynet (EN), is the leading Israeli online news source (WP entry) belonging to the largest Israeli newspaper, Yediot Ahronot (well, perhaps second largest at this point).  Just recently they’ve upgraded the website and added some neat features, but apparently didn’t do such a great job with search.

Yesterday, Veronica was searching for a followup article about a surfer who disappeared in the sea a few days earlier.  She entered the word “surfer” in Hebrew (can be also read as “surfing”), hit the search button, and got the following:

Leaving aside the fact that the default for search on Ynet is searching the web and not the website, the results are pretty amusing.  For those who cannot read Hebrew, the top result with a redish picture on its right is the promoted website.  It could be not as remarkable unless the promoted website would not be a sex website accompanied by a rather detailed of the content you may find there.

And I am asking, what does it have to do with a word “surfer”?  What is the logical explanation for a sex site being the top promoted result in this search?  Can anyone explain that to me, please?

Visualizing the inauguration

In the spirit of recent days, AKA obsession with the inauguration, I thought to share a couple of visualizations of Obama’s speech.

The first one is using the IBM’s “Many Eyes“:

The other one is from NY Times:

I am not sure what exactly stands behind each one of the visualizations, because the results are slightly different, but I think each one is interesting in its own way.  I think this is probably just the beginning of what we are going to see being done with all the information the new administration is putting out.  As one of my friends said: “Obama is over-communicator and it suits me”.

Also, you may be interested in checking out CNN’s 3D visualization using Microsoft’s Photosynth.  This one requires installation, but once you have it, you will be able to use the tool to view a 3D picture of the inauguration compiled from pictures that regular people have taken and volunteered to CNN/MS.  Unfortunately, there are not that many pictures in the database, so the result is not as smooth as some of the demos they had when the project was still in beta.

That’s it, this is my contribution to the hype at the moment.  Now back to work.

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